There’s something developers don’t talk about enough. And it’s not because it’s rare — it’s because when it happens, it hits hard and it's almost impossible to reproduce.
Let me explain.
In dev environments, everything works perfectly. Catalogs are clean. Attributes are always there. All the data looks amazing.
But that’s not real life.
In production, things get messy. Integrations fail. Imports go wrong. And one day, out of nowhere, a corrupt product lands in your catalog.
That’s exactly what happened to us.
The product came in missing some required field — we don’t even remember which one. The result? In the PLP it showed a broken image, no name, and the price literally said "null". Visually, a disaster. But the worst part? The Add to Cart button was still there.
You’d expect it not to work, and it didn’t — on web. When clicking Add to Cart, the Product2Cart call threw a 500 error. At least that part was safe.
But wait.
We also had a mobile app using SCAPI.
And those endpoints, while similar, didn’t behave the same. So yes — users managed to add that broken product to the cart through the app.
And what happens then? Well, nothing good.
When the cart hits the calculate hook, the totals don’t add up — literally. No totals, no checkout, nothing. But it gets worse.
We had implemented Session Bridge, so when that user later came to the web to try again… surprise! His corrupted cart followed him.
Now this customer couldn’t:
add new products
delete the broken product
check out
or even clear his cart
And since we had the cart deletion feature hidden under a hover action in the mini cart… it was a dead end.
Customer stuck. Cart frozen. Checkout blocked.
At this point, support tickets started pouring in. Angry customers. Confused support agents. And we couldn’t even reproduce the issue because it only affected a few unlucky users.
Until we remembered a gem inside Business Manager:
Customer Service Support
This underrated Salesforce tool lets you impersonate a real user’s session. You can:
browse their cart
go through checkout for them
or simply see what’s wrong without guessing
Using it, we accessed one of the affected user sessions, reviewed their cart, checked the PDPs one by one… and boom. Found the broken product.
We fixed the missing attributes, cleaned up the data, and the issue disappeared.
Without this tool, we would’ve had to rely on APIs to fetch carts — which means authenticating as the user, asking for passwords, triggering security concerns, etc.
So if you’ve never used Customer Service Support, now you know. It’s built-in. It works. And it can save your ass when things go south.
